Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Wednesday December 05, 2012 @02:02PM
from the blame-rusty dept.

The Maine lobster population is booming, but it turns out that's bad news if you're a little lobster: "'We've got the lobsters feeding back on themselves just because they're so abundant,' said Richard Wahle, a marine sciences professor at the University of Maine, who is supervising the research. 'It's never been observed just out in the open like this,' he said."
Abundance caused by populations of their predators collapsing.

Interesting fact about lobsters, they haven't always been considered delicious. In colonial times, lobsters were considered "poverty food." They were harvested from tidal pools and served to children, to prisoners, and to indentured servants. In Massachusetts, some of the servants rebelled and demanded that they would not be forced to eat lobster more than three times a week.

In fact I met a old woman who told me that, when she was young, she would hide and eat her school lunch- her family was too poor to afford anything other than lobster and the other kids would tease her.

I just goes to show you how society, culture and advertising controls our behaviour, beliefs and taste buds.

As far as this lobster "overpopulated" lobster nonsense- call me when you can walk along the shore at low tide and just pick them up by the dozens (as was common in years past). That would be the natural equilibrium population before we started commercially harvesting.

This whole "overpopulated" is clearly perpetuated by someone who wants increased quotas.

Hmm...well, if you have too many lobsters...ship'em down here, and we'll come up with a good Lobster Gumbo...or Etoufee, or Courtboullion, or Lobster Remoulade over Fried Green tomatoes...or Lobster and Corn Bisque...or.....

There is a good, free market, reason for this. If you live outside Maine, the cost of shipping live lobsters is mostly keeping them alive (water is heavy, temperatures need to be maintained, etc.). If you live in Maine, then the restaurants aren't limited by the price of their food, but by their seating/serving capacity. They can charge their normal price, and still fill all their seats, so why lower the price?

Yes, it is. my mom, when were were young, and on food stamps, used to buy lobster on sale - and people would stare. But a 1 1/4 lb lobster actually goes a long way, better than steak. You get enough to keep 2 pre-teen kids happy, pick the carcass for all the leftover meat and get a nice stew for another meal minimum. We were 5 kids, so 4 lobsters would feed us for 3 dinners, about $12-15 on sale. Not that we complained much...

I live in Las Vegas and they have seemingly limitless supplies of Alaska king crab at the buffet for a reasonable price. How come, given this alleged overabundance of Maine lobster, it's not the same for lobster?? I want my $15 all-you-can-eat lobster buffet!!

Actually, most lobster is shipped packed with dry ice, watere is not necessary, and weight is not the issue. It;s nearly impossible to keep lobsters alive in shipping for more than 24 hours (read that as, 25+ hours), so they go by air if the truck can;t get there in time. And nothing quite matches the odor of dead lobster, even packed. Most airlines I know that take them do so with the caveat that if they are not picked up nearly immediately, they go in the trash.

True in practice, though it's a bit misleading as a practice. The terminology dates to fish taverns that had fixed prices for items with relatively stable prices, but varying "market price" for items where the wholesale cost to them varied significantly, resulting in them updating their retail price on a daily basis accordingly. Of course, that's not how big fish restaurants actually set prices, but they like to maintain the fiction.

True in practice, though it's a bit misleading as a practice. The terminology dates to fish taverns that had fixed prices for items with relatively stable prices, but varying "market price" for items where the wholesale cost to them varied significantly, resulting in them updating their retail price on a daily basis accordingly.

The definition of "market price" is impacted very little by cute stories that may or may not have any actual basis in history and not at all by what you want it to mean.

market price
Noun
The price of a commodity when sold in a given market.

It doesn't matter what it costs the seller to produce the good. Market price is what it can be sold for. If the seller's cost is higher than market price the seller has a problem. If the seller's cost is lower than market price, they have the potential to profit

Sarcasm and inference are both broken on the Internet. Please fix that.

BTW, I know it can't be fixed and has nothing to do with the Internet. BTW stands for "By the way". Yes, I know that re-stating a common abbreviation is irritating. My sig is a joke. Yes I know the joke isn't funny if I say it's a joke. Yes I know this disclaimer is too long to read. This disclaimer is an object lesson in what I think ought to be one of "the laws" for the Internet, right up there with Godwin. It goes something like this: "if there's something ridiculous to be inferred from what you've typed in a forum, it will be inferred" with a corrolary, "no amount of explanation can prevent such inferences". Furthermore, I did not copy this from Chuck Lorre. Yes I know I'm not as good as Chuck Lorre. Neither are you. Yes I know that you can't Godwin something explicitly, and so on and so forth, ad nauseum until we all explode. No I don't have schizophrenia or live in my parent's basement. You do. Yes I know that's childish. Yes, any attempt to disclaim only leads to more misunderstandings. Thus, one can only conclude that this is a strange game in which the only winning move is not to play. That's a War Games reference. Yes I know you knew that. Yes I know you didn't know that. Yes I'll Google War Games for you. No I won't...

It's a worrisome development and means that overfishing is collapsing the local ecosystem.
It's no joke, and it's happening all over the world, the scenario is converging for a catastrophic decline in fish populations.

We go to the market and see the fish case always stocked. But the thing to realize, that as species are being fished out, they fill the case with other species. And prices on some species are skyrocketing.

Farming isn't very viable in many cases because they feed the farmed fish wild caught fish and the cages pollute the ecosystem so badly that the wild fish start to die out. Trout and Talpia are the only ones IIRC that are farmed sustainably - definitely not salmon.

Or we'll develop some technology that makes the food-related cost similar to what it is now. That's another "invisible hand" thing that happens. Before we chicken-little maybe we should consider the availability of phosphorus outside of the obvious sources.

Just because they're the most farmed fish in the world doesn't mean they are sustainable. Passenger pigeons, at one point, were the most-harvested bird species in the US... turns out that wasn't sustainable. One difference between passenger pigeons and salmon is what the diminishing resource is... in the case of the pigeons, it was the pigeons themselves that were hunted to extinction. For salmon, the resource is ocean/shore localities suit

Just because they're the most farmed fish in the world doesn't mean they are sustainable. Passenger pigeons, at one point, were the most-harvested bird species in the US... turns out that wasn't sustainable.

Farmed != harvested. It's pretty deceptive to equate the two. For example, if passenger pigeons had been farmed instead of just harvested in the wild, they would still be with us today.

A second bit of deception comes from the term, "sustainable". Sustainability is not a bit you set, but a matter of degree. Merely farming a fish that was previously harvested in the wild is a huge improvement in sustainability. Also virtually everything is sustainable in small amounts, be it fish farming or nuclear meltdow

Or so say the econazis and global warming hoaxists. Meanwhile there isn't a single shred of evidence backing any of these claims up. You leftists will say anything to impose new regulations and taxes on the free market though won't you?

It's a common theme that fishing boats have to fish more, travel further, and fish less desirable species in order to get a catch. This issue is also pretty orthogonal to most environmental issues, particularly, the notorious sky-is-falling rhetoric of catastrophic AGW. It requires some sort of controlled fishing either by governments or fishermen of wild fish stocks. It doesn't require you to buy in to the other issues.

While our governments are busy interfering in health care, hiring and firing practices, agricultural funding and a million things the market would manage - here we have Tragedy of the Commons problem custom-made for government solutions but our governments don't seem very interested in doing something about it.

The article I read stated that conservation has a hand in it. Kind of like the wildfires getting worse because of burn laws reducing smaller fire occurrence. Honestly, I am waiting for Mayor Quimby to take over at this point.

Originally, lobster was originally poor-people's food. In the USA New-England area in both pre-colonial times, they were so plentiful that native americans and early colonists could simply catch them from tidal pools along the shoreline. This made lobsters cheap food to serve toe prisoners and indentured servant (those that bartered for passage to the "new-world" with labor contracts). With the Cod populations crashing, it sounds like we are going back to those times...

The reason lobster got expensive was that transportation costs used to be a large part of the price. Also over time, with most profitible businesses, often the infrastructure determines the price more than the supply. People that own parts of the infrastructure (fishing territories, relay-holding ponds, lobster gangs [google.com], etc) demand a price level to keep their profit margin the same even when the underlying commodity supply goes up which would nominally send the price down.

They arent tasty, and they arent exactly protein of high quality, besides the cholesterol problems. And they are darn ugly too. Besides I remember when I was in Angola that they were cheap than most food in upmarket restaurants, and even so. When eating lobster, what counts more is the preparation than the quality of the ingredient actually. Medium/Tiger prawn are so much more tastier than lobster.

"Aren't tasty"? Really? I usually eat them straight out of the shell (preparation: steamed, rarely boiled). No extra fatty butter or other sauce. Mind you, I don't over-salt or over-flavour my regular food either, maybe that's why you don't get any taste out of them? I don't recall un-sauced shrimp (prawn) being any tastier, just a different taste and texture.

preparation? A live lobster and a pot of boiling water. This is not hard, people. If you can;t tell if your lobster is alive, it probably isn't, and never cook dead (or dying) lobster.

Quick primer. Boil until the shell is bright red, plunging the lobster in headfirst. It never realized it was dead.

Serve with baked potato, corn on the cob or greeen geans, plenty of melted butter available. Crack the claws off and open, pull out the meat, drop it in the butter. inCrack off the tail, tear off the tail fins and suck on them like candy:). take a cunck of claw meat and eat that, making room for the tail in the butter. If you're lazy, this is it. Otherwise, the knuckles above the claw have meat, each leg has a thread of meat, those tail fins usually do also. there is meat all through the body (carapace), and a little work nearly doubles your haul. Or give it to someone who knows how to get in there. Avoid the tomalley if you don't know what it is.

How to tell if yo got a Maine lobster? Measure the carapace, which had better measure between 3 1/2 and 5 inches from the end of the carapace to the edge of the eye socket. Cheating is very rare in Maine waters, lobstermen will send each other to jail over this... If it is shorter, good chance it came from Canada, or possibly Massachussetts. Those big spots the tail when raw/live? That is not a Maine lobster, probably a Longostino, which is not a lobster. Most are actually shrimp.

Why is this bad? It sounds to me like the population will control itself and there is built in limitations to the growth rate...who gives a shit what a little lobster does? They don't feel anything anyways!

This is what the last "great" deed of humanity will be once we decimate the food chain and our food sources wither away... I, for one, give the lobster species a honorary status of Nostradamus with pincers.

I don't know about respect. I've got compassion for anyone who is starving to death. People in that situation will eat anything: grass, bark, dirt, rocks, rotten things, people, etc. You can be certain that people have eaten anything they can get their hands on. Most things that turn out to not kill you ends up in our regular diet, subject to cultural preferences.

Maybe you're too young to remember, or you can't find it easily on the Internets, but back in the 60s when I was a kid, my family used to own French House Island off Jonesport in Maine, and we'd be up there every summer.

It had been observed then.

Now, that said, there's nothing better than Maine Lobster. We used to make blueberry pancakes from the blueberries on the island, and eat fresh lobster in butter, as well as clams we dug up and mussels.

But just because you can't find it observed this century doesn't mean it's "never been observed".

Considering the primitive brain those bugs have, I fail to see why anyone would be surprised at their cannibalism, the rule of thumb in the ocean is anything you can eat, you do eat. 90% of my goldfish and koi fry are lost to cannibalism and predation.

Remove the ability for corporations to donate to political campaigns/politicians at all, this problem goes away.Limit personal contributions also, so the "heads" of these corporations cant just continue to buy elections.

Remove the ability for corporations to donate to political campaigns/politicians at all, this problem goes away.
Limit personal contributions also, so the "heads" of these corporations cant just continue to buy elections.

Even better would be removing the ability of politicians to donate tax money to corporations. Also reduce the amount of government interference in the free market and you'll remove the reasons that corporations donate to political campaigns/politicians.

Because they're actually still kind of hard to catch? It's either baited cages or scuba divers with a bag. Either one is much more time intensive than dropping a huge net behind a ship then hauling it back in.